Ooh. I didn't think of having two apache configurations on the same server ... one that does media serving and is streamlined and one that does mod_php. I would prefer this over nginx. At least have the sanity of staying in one world. Thanks for that tip.

So I run multiple sites on this server and plan to keep adding more, so that's another reason configuration maintenance is an issue. Not to mention one day I plan to write a web gui to handle all this configuration ... and I don't need nginx's super-duper performance. I need a stable piece of software to configure, apache does everything, I've been using it for years, know all the ins and outs, and memory is cheap. Just mod_php is the bear and you add drupal to that and you have a beast.

I don't know what the bottleneck is really, that is part of the problem. But I know that every now and then when we we get bursts of traffic I can find with a /server-status that 50 apache processing are in a write state.